St Sophia Cathedral. The President and his family are praying. The country is watching them in this intimate act through a television keyhole. I feel embarrassed and switch off the TV set.

Investigators immediately and definitely qualified the mysterious death of Transport Minister Georgiy Kirpa as a suicide. That is rather strange, considering the Ukrainian law enforcers’ usual practice of withholding concrete definitions. Moreover, Kirpa left no death note explaining the motive.

The 2005 budget process in Ukraine has erased all the differences between the law and lawlessness, between good and bad, between civilization and wildness.

Roughly speaking, one can consider that the relative success of Central European countries depends mainly on small and medium-sized businesses and foreign direct investment. The policy of supporting foreign direct investment was initiated in Hungary as early as the late 1980s.

The second process was to make the taxation system compatible with European Union legislation. This could be achieved, for example, by raising excise tax rates to the minimum level required by the EU and abolishing VAT exemptions. This process was stretched over many years to avoid inflationary shocks.

• A constant and serious imbalance between supply and demand

In practice, there are three ways of providing pension coverage for the elderly: either through taxes, or through saving money (a funding scheme), or through insurance, which means buying a promise of a share in future production (an unfunded scheme, often in the form of a so-called pay-as-you-go system).

There are two main characteristic features of macroeconomic stability that matter for transition economies: maintaining public finances at an appropriate level and an adequate anti-inflationary monetary policy. The absence of either feature will sooner or later require significant policy correction.

It is now obvious that Russian spin doctors, specially commissioned by their clients in the Presidential Office in Kyiv, exploited the idea of “civil war” as a leitmotif for the presidential campaign in Ukraine. This idea gave rise to twin myths, that of the pro-Russian and the anti-Russian candidates.